One of the most powerful tools for affiliate promotion is your affiliate marketing web site, and with today’s online technology a blog is usually your easiest and best choice.

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Self-hosted WordPress blogs are easy to set up, easily updated and can be indexed in many directories beyond the traditional search engines automatically. This makes doing SEO for your affiliate marketing web site much easier and lets you focus that much more of your time on other affiliate promotion strategies.

Building a money-making blog using affiliate marketing involves everything from the ads in your sidebar to the topics you write about. By keeping all your posts targeted to the particular audience you’re targeting you can build a following and start to warm them up regarding the products and services you’ll be offering them in your affiliate promotion.

Further, you can use ads and posts to drive targeted traffic to your squeeze pages and opt-in forms, thus building your affiliate marketing list at the same time. This dual purpose – building your list and demonstrating your expertise within your target niche, will constitute the bulk of your affiliate marketing work online, and can go a long way towards making affiliate marketing pay for you.

Your affiliate blogging also gives you a home base online, a great place to drive targeted prospects to from your article marketing, podcasting and affiliate marketing video efforts. While your site is designed to be a traffic magnet on it’s own, sending additional web site traffic to it using these techniques and the various Web 2.0 sites that allow business networking will help a lot for making money affiliate marketing.

Using affiliate marketing to make money online, especially with your own affiliate marketing web site, is one of the most common ways to start a home business – and setting your site up right, hooking it into the various Web 2.0 sites and using strategies like Twitter affiliate marketing to drive targeted prospects to your web site should make your affiliate marketing pay that much sooner.